1. Field of the Invention
Apparatuses and methods consistent with the present invention relate to generating and reproducing media object-based metadata, and more particularly, to generating and reproducing a media metadata framework which is suitable for real-time reproduction and modification of a multimedia object.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the manufacture and use of multimedia contents increase, a need to search for and filter multimedia contents has emerged, and various methods for encoding metadata have been suggested.
Metadata refers to data that briefly describes the contents and characteristics of information in a specific format in order to make it easy to search for and access information resources in various forms, i.e., information about the information resources.
FIG. 1 illustrates a media file format or the structure of a media metadata framework in a moving picture experts group (MPEG)-2 system.
Referring to FIG. 1, a media metadata stream includes metadata 110. The metadata 110 includes profile information for decoding media objects 120 and 130 included in a media stream, and position information of the media objects 120 and 130.
Since the metadata 110 includes identifiers (IDs) or positions of the media objects (multimedia contents) 120 and 130, a user can easily access the media objects (multimedia contents) 120 and 130 by using the metadata 110.
In a multimedia system such as an MPEG-4 system, content is described on a scene basis, and metadata is configured separately for object description data and scene description data for a media stream.
However, in this scheme, the metadata is configured on a scene basis, making it difficult to modify or obtain only some of media objects of the content.
Moreover, since media objects can be accessed only by using the metadata, any loss in a metadata stream during content streaming may cause problems in configuring a scene.